Archive for » May, 2010 «

Insanity

20
May 2010

I don’t remember who but someone said the definition of insanity is the doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result.

This is me every Little League season — it is an insane time. With four kids, we end up have something happening every single night of the week. And most nights? There are several things happening, and they are happening in more than one spot.

Take a look:

Monday: Maxine has a game in Grayling at 6 p.m., but Justin has practice in Houghton Lake at 6 p.m. except Justin didn’t really have practice because he has a game Tuesday but that’s OK because we had to pick up Amanda from her practice, so we really needed to be in Houghton Lake. Reminder: Linda needs to get a copy of Justin’s schedule.

Tuesday: Autumn and Amanda both have a double header in Houghton Lake, Justin has a game in Roscommon at 6 p.m. and Maxine has track practice until 5:30 in Houghton Lake except Justin’s game is canceled due to a 5,000 acre fire in Crawford County, which was about 6 miles from the Little League fields. Of course, it is canceled just minutes before we pull into the field’s parking lot.

Note: Justin’s coach said their first game was canceled due to rain and the second was canceled due to fire, and he expressed worry that the third game would be canceled due to wind or hail….

Wednesday: It is Autumn’s birthday (she’s 16!), plus Amanda has softball practice, Maxine has a track conference meet (Linda is supposed to help keep score) and Justin has a game at 6 p.m. in Houghton Lake. We finally all arrived home at 8 p.m. to eat dinner together and have cake and ice cream for Autumn’s birthday.

Today, it is more of the same. We have an away game for softball (Farwell?), and a band concert for three of the four children including two who are also supposed to be at the away game at the very same time the concert is going on.

We’re going to split the children in two. It’s the only thing we can do, right?

Welcome to Little League season in the Sherwood household: it is a scheduling nightmare at times, but I LOVE watching the kids play.

Category: Parenting  Tags: , , ,  Comments off

Battle of the Books

11
May 2010

Or as my husband likes to refer to it…. Battle of the Nerds.

Of course, it isn’t really a battle of nerds: it is a battle of readers. Teams of 3 to 5 people read 11 books and prepare for about two months or so and then compete in battles. The teams are asked questions about the books, and the answers are always the title and author of one of the 11 books.

Last Saturday was our local library’s elimination battle. It took place on the high school stage and 10 BOB teams participated. (It always throws my husband off when I refer to the competition as Bob. He wonders who the heck I am talking about.)

I coached one of those teams: Book Warriors, which includes 2 fourth-grade girls and 2 fifth-grade boys including my son, Justin.

And the teams met Avi!

The battle takes place in 3 rounds of 10 questions each. After the second round, the Book Warriors were in second place, and I was so impressed with everyone. These kids knew their books, and to be clear, I mean the kids that make up ALL of the teams.

It surprised me to realize that this is a FUN competition to watch even if you haven’t read the books. The answers have to be neat and spelled correctly. It just kills you to watch someone’s correct answer receive 0 points because of a missing letter.

After the third round, three teams moved on to the final competition. It is serious business: Houghton Lake teams will be battling against teams from Gaylord and Lake City. There will be a video performance.

And the Book Warriors? They are moving on! They did great!

But word has it that the competing schools are sending along some tough teams. The final battle is May 22, and we will be ready!

The books for this year includes the following:
The Lemonade War by Davies
The Wednesday Wars by Schmidt
Ragweed by Avi
My One Hundred Adventures by Horvath
Heartbeat by Creech
The Gollywhopper Games by Feldman
A Wrinkle in Time by L’Engle
Who was Eleanor Roosevelt? by Thompson
Sheep by Hobbs
No Talking by Clements
Leepike Ridge by Wilson

Another sad part — all of the kids worked really hard, and some were very disappointed their teams didn’t move on. It is hard seeing those tears, but it also shows how invested the kids get in the competition.

Sample questions:

In which book did a teacher ask a girl, “…how a child with parents as brilliant as yours are supposed to be, can be such a poor student”?

In which book is the main character known by five different names?

For more info on BOB, check out one of these websites:
www.battleofthebooks.com
www.battleofthebooks.org

Category: Bragging Mother, Parenting, Teaching Resources  Tags: , ,  Comments off

Messy, Messy, Messy

07
May 2010

I realized this morning that my online life was very very messy. It took a phone call from my website’s abuse department, which was a scary phone call before 9 a.m. (although this phone call would be scary at any time).

Apparently, someone took advantage of my messy online life and created some very authentic looking web pages in order to phish account information from unsuspecting people. The pages appeared on my web site. They wanted to know if I could please delete the offending files. They were actually pretty nice about it, and the default setting wasn’t “You are guilty” but “You are a victim too.” Whew.

The suggestion was that if I was hosting a blog, my blog application was out of date, which would make my site vulnerable. I immediately logged into my blog and confirmed that I was using the latest application.

It wasn’t until I opened up the screenshot sent to me as well as my FTP that I realized it wasn’t my current blog that was the problem. It was one that I still had that was now just a redirect to the current blog. I hadn’t logged into that blog account since I combined all of my blogs into one spot and changed the name to Digital Rhetoric. And that meant that blog’s software wasn’t updated to the latest and greatest.

When I first did the redirect, I deleted all of my FTP and photo and teaching blog stuff, which left a messy “file not found” problem for the pages within those blogs. And that is when I realized I could just use a redirect, so that is what I did for my lindasherwood.com blog. And it was the lindasherwood.com blog that phishers used to create the fake pages.

The first email notifying me of the problem was sent to me at 11 a.m. yesterday. Of course, I hadn’t read my email yet. If I hadn’t got the phone call this morning, I’m not sure I would have realized it today. Or more likely, I wouldn’t have realized it until after I left the house and didn’t have the means to fix it until I returned home later today.

And as I was going through my various files for lindasherwood.com, I realized that the background stuff of my web site is very very messy. I installed WordPress in 2009, and I made my site function using blog software then. Before that, I had a regular web site with lots of pages, and you can still see some of those pages by typing the URL directly: www.lindasherwood.com/portfolio.html I had forgotten that web site version was even still available! And most of the links still work.

So, in an effort to clean up my website, I have deleted a bunch of files this morning. And in doing so, I made my main page, lindasherwood.com not work. I’ll fix it later. The important part is that I also got rid of the phishing pages.

This is also why my site’s main page: lindasherwood.com isn’t working right now.

And here is a couple of links about phishing that was sent to me by my hosting site’s abuse department:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phishing
http://www.antiphishing.org/

Have you cleaned up your website lately?

Category: Freelance Writing Tips, Web/Tech, Weblogs  Tags: , ,  Comments off

Morning Madness

06
May 2010

When we only had one bathroom, they were a lot smaller and friendlier to each other....

Like most people, our household has a morning routine. It begins when my hubby gets up at an insane time. After a bit of coaxing, I usually get up as well.

Insane time = before 6 a.m.

During this time, I usually make him lunch and pour his coffee. People are always shocked when he tells them that I do this, but after 20 years, he expects it.

And normally, I enjoy the time in the morning when it is just us. But this week has not been normal. This has been the week of sick. I’m sick. He’s sick. She’s sick. She’s sick. She’s sick. He’s sick. We’re all sick.

Middle girl went in with an ear infection, and the youngest girl has something that resembles a urinary tract infection, but it isn’t really. Not to mention that the doctor suggested that the youngest girl’s request for the heating pad might have something to do with her kidneys and not because she is a hypochondriac as her mother always seems to think.

But that was a digression. I was talking about morning routines.

Middle daughter with the ear infections? She is the one that obsesses over the time and makes sure that everyone gets on the bus on time. You would think I would be that person, but middle daughter does it so well, and she just sort of took over that role.

And the day middle child stayed home sick? One child missed the bus. I was able to take her to a bus stop further down the line, but middle child’s absence was noticed.

So yesterday, I decided I was too sick to stay up, so after my hubby left for work, I went back to bed and let the children fend for themselves.

My absence, however, meant no one ever turned on the morning news, which meant the middle child didn’t have a clock to refer to.

Digression #2: My children would be lost without the ability to hit the “info” button and make the time show up on the TV screen. They do not know how to read the analog clock in the kitchen, and the two digital clocks in the kitchen are too far out of the way to actually use. /digression.

And the children almost missed the bus. They all made it, and I only had one phone call about forgotten stuff that I needed to bring to the school, which I promptly forgot to do. Turns out, the things weren’t really needed.

And hubby says I can’t go back to bed. It is a parental responsibility or something to make sure the kids are getting ready for school and don’t miss the bus.

So, who do you think should take on the title of parent in the morning? My vote is for the middle child. My bed was really cozy.

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Category: Family, Mother of the Yeeeaar  Tags: ,  Comments off